On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 6:06 AM, Peter Rabbitson <ribasu...@cpan.org> wrote:
> Copying a rhetorical question from #distzilla here, as it warrants a wider > audience. The background is yet another discussion of a kludgy workaround > where an installation with an older JSON parser is tripped by unicode in > META.json. Unicode that doesn't really serve any purpose for an installing > client. > The point of META is to describe distributions. The original META spec includes author name information. Names require international character sets. Other textual information (such as abstracts) could also contain international characters. The META 2 spec was specific about this in a way that the Meta 1.x specs were not. Because the primary purpose of META is to provide metadata, Unicode is essential to do that job correctly in a way that doesn't discriminate against non-English cultures. The more interesting question is "why are we using META for installation" -- and that we should split in two: (1) Why are we using META.* for installation? (2) Why are we using MYMETA.* for installation? We're using (1) because it was already there and was (theoretically) statically parsable to determine configure_requires. We're using (2) because it was convenient to follow an already known format from (1) rather than build yet another standard. If the problem with Unicode on certain Perls is with META, there's not much to be done at this point. Remember the days when users were constantly told "upgrade your M::B" or "upgrade your EU::MM" to fix various installation problems? It was a regular thing (and one of the things people hated about MB). Now, in relatively rare circumstances (and I think only on older Perls), someone has to upgrade their JSON parser. I can live with that. If the problem is with MYMETA, I have no problem having MYMETA strip out everything but absolutely essential fields – but then affected users have to upgrade their EU::MM/M::B, which is no better than having them upgrade their JSON parser, so I don't think it's worth the effort to do so. David -- David Golden <x...@xdg.me> Twitter/IRC/Github: @xdg
